There are various reasons why you may need to block certain websites. One could be that you are a parent and want to block sites that you do not want your child to visit or may be that you want to block some spamming sites or it is just that you wish to block certain sites like Orkut, Facebook etc.

This can be done easily without purchasing any expensive software and free of costs with just updating the Windows Hosts file. Hosts file is the file that keeps information about a node on a computer network.

Steps:

1.    Open Command Prompt by typing cmd in the Run.

2.    In the command prompt type “notepad C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts” without quotes.

3.    This will open a notepad file and locate a line saying 127.0.0.1 localhost.

4.    Now under that line type the website address you want to block prefixed with 127.0.0.1 example:  127.0.0.1 orkut.com

5.    Now just save the file and exit. You can add several sites following this method.

6.    To remove the restrictions just remove the addresses.